UX Magazine sets out to explore, promote & discuss the multiple facets of user experience one article at a time. It is a collaborative publication by writers, technologists, designers, marketeers & business gurus from around the world.

Old Wine in New Bottles and New Wine in Old Bottles :

Underlying the recent surge in interest in user experience may be the realization that consumers have increasing power over the fate of information technology. Taken literally, user experience concerns the subjective first-person feeling (hence “experience”) arising when technology is being used for something (hence “user”). This is the interpretation we assume in the rest of this article.

We claim that the failure to produce a reliable scientific body of knowledge about UX is partly due to falsely treating it as a new topic, as if nothing has ever been said about it before. Although it is inaccurate to claim that UX has been entirely ignorant of psychology, treating UX as if it was something truly novel is one of the biggest impediments to scientific progress in this field, and it is manifest in the lack of reliable methods and actionable theories. We need to reformulate our understanding of UX in…read more
By Antti Oulasvirta, Pertti Saariluoma, Rebekah Rousi, Jaana Leikas

Developers, UX Is Your Business Too! :

Software developers often think the user experience as something better left to either the interaction designers or the visual designers on their teams. In actuality, developers can have profound impacts on the user experience of the products they’re working on. This article will explore some areas of experience design in which the development process has a more direct role. This is not to say that developers can substitute for UX and interaction designers, but they can play a role in making compelling applications.

Limit the User’s Choices

This may sound counterintuitive, but when a user is given too many choices, it makes it harder for the user to make any choices. When faced with an excess of choice, the user might abandon the application altogether, which is certainly not the choice we want them to make….read more
By Chris Griffith

Better UX Design Needed for Enterprise Tablet Adoption :

A May 2011 study shows that 78 percent of business and IT executives plan to officially deploy tablets by the end of 2013, yet only 51 percent have adopted a strategy for tablet use. The majority (83 percent) plans to deploy iPads, primarily because of its widespread popularity. As a result, Android-based tablets have begun to tout that they are designed for enterprise deployment in an attempt to differentiate their platform.

This choice of the iPad for business use remains consumer-driven. So far, most employees using iPads as part of their job are just trying them out; there is still a certain sense of novelty in this highly portable device…read more
By Peter Eckert

6 Disciplines for Reaching Customer Experience Maturity :

Most companies say they want to differentiate themselves based on a superior customer experience. But the reality is very few manage to provide an experience that truly differentiates a brand from competitors. Consider the health insurance industry: as a group, this entire industry is in its customer experience infancy, earning a “very poor” rating of just 53 (on a 100-point scale) in Forrester’s annual Customer Experience Index study.

So how can organizations excel at customer experience and advance to higher levels of maturity? And how can they sustain those advances once they’ve made them? The basis for organizational maturity in any field stems from adopting and consistently performing a set of sound, repeatable practices that lead to excellence. In the world of customer experience, maturity is about the extent to which an organization routinely performs the practices required to design, implement, and manage…read more
By Megan Burns

Thinking Inside a Smaller Box : One strategy for becoming a better designer

Crafting truly inspired user interface designs is hard. Any schmoe can slap a listbox and a couple of buttons on a screen and meet a user need (although sometimes a couple of buttons and a listbox is the optimal design). However, as modern software development tools such as WPF unshackle developers to let them efficiently realize any design they can dream up, we have a responsibility to more vigorously challenge our design proposals. While I do not advocate complexity or innovation for their own sake, there are cases where challenging conventional design metaphors can lead to much more elegant and pleasing solutions for users. If we are to create user interactions that transcend from the ordinary into the sublime, we need to invest significantly more energy and creativity. Modern tools let us ask…read more
By Mike Heydlauf

Developers can have profound impacts on the UX of the products they’re working on.

Software developers often think the user experience as something better left to either the interaction designers or the visual designers on their teams. In actuality, developers can have profound impacts on the user experience of the products they’re working on. This article will explore some areas of experience design in which the development process has a more direct role. This is not to say that developers can substitute for UX and interaction designers, but they can play a role in making compelling applications.

Software developers often think the user experience as something better left to either the interaction designers or the visual designers on their teams. In actuality, developers can have profound impacts on the user experience of the products they’re working on. This article will explore some areas of experience design in which the development process has a more direct role. This is not to say that developers can substitute for UX and interaction designers, but they can play a role in making compelling applications.

Limit the User’s Choices

This may sound counterintuitive, but when a user is given too many choices, it makes it harder for the user to make any choices. When faced with an excess of choice, the user might abandon the application altogether, which is…read more
By Chris Griffith

Software developers often think the user experience as something better left to either the interaction designers or the visual designers on their teams. In actuality, developers can have profound impacts on the user experience of the products they’re working on. This article will explore some areas of experience design in which the development process has a more direct role. This is not to say that developers can substitute for UX and interaction designers, but they can play a role in making compelling applications.

Limit the User’s Choices

This may sound counterintuitive, but when a user is given too many choices, it makes it harder for the user to make any choices. When faced with an excess of choice, the user might abandon the…read more
By Chris Griffith